17. Demonstration. We concluded in the preceding discussion1 that it is not contrary to reason, but rather consonant with reason, that those who depart from life bound by the guilt of a fault should be punished for as long as they exist. But the condition of the human soul is such that it never perishes and always exists and lives. Therefore it is impossible for it to be contrary to reason that those who complete the course of the present life as enemies of God and subject to the penal sanction should be punished with punishments which will endure perpetually.
18. And why, I ask, would this be contrary to reason? Because they would be punished undeservedly? But guilt itself is a sufficient desert; therefore, while the guilt always remains, the worthiness of punishment likewise always remains.
But what if sinners repent, retract their deed, and flee to the divine mercy? I hear the objection, but at the same time I see that these things are objected in vain. Let it be granted that sinners both can and will do all these things in the other age. What has been done is not thereby rendered undone; nor does it thereby cease to be true that, for as long as they lived, the divine goodness was contemned by them; nor is it thereby false that God could circumscribe the time of pardon and condonation by the limits of mortal life.
Wherefore, if anything follows from the objection proposed, it is this: that God is at liberty to have mercy also upon those who have died as sinners. But it in no way follows either that God ought to have mercy upon them, or that God could not have chosen beforehand an order of providence of this kind, by the establishment of which neither remission nor pardon ought to be granted to those who have put off this mortality bound by sin.
Scholion
19. This truth is of such great moment, and human sentiment resists it so greatly, that it is worthwhile to establish belief in it also by another path and in another manner. This we now undertake.
Footnotes
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The preceding theorem. ↩